Lately, too many of my thoughts have been pinned onto a
secret wish, a wish like so many other wishes that will very likely not come
true. Still, I seem to be powerless to stop wishing it.
It started a few years back with a visit to my old house. It
didn’t look very much like my old house, but the blue paint its new owner had
applied no longer fully concealed the brown asphalt shingles of my house. I could see it peeking through. The steeply pitched roof had been pushed out with dormers added on one
side, so it was no longer shaped like my house either. The driveway was almost
undecipherable from the lawns as it all together reminded me of one of the things
I always loved about the property, it had distinctive weeds. The field weeds
that were mower tamed when I lived there had obviously, for quite some time, been
allowed to roam and root without constraint. The field, my field, had long before been sold as a separate parcel and its
new owner built a house right where I had hoped my horses and cow would graze.
A thicket of trees also new to the land, concealed the new house in the field
so it was not difficult to still visually imagine the land unoccupied all the
way to the creek. Just like when it was mine, just like when it was Grandpa’s
when I was only a kid, and just like when my dad was only a kid. I liked to be
able to imagine it that way.
I could picture myself, scissors in hand, stepping to the
fields edge for a cutting of Queen Anne’s Lace and Black-Eyed-Susan’s to put in
a vase on the pink Formica kitchen table, but the field flowers were not there
anymore, the field was not there anymore. Some orange Tiger Lilies seemed happy
enough to push up stubborn, even though it was apparent no residents would
commend their performance. But that day, for those few moments, I did. They
were new, not the flowers of my
field, but still, they seemed to stand in honor of those that had pushed up the
soil before them.
I stood and looked it all over. The rail that my other
grandpa built for me still enclosed the front porch that once served as a kind
of giant outdoor play pen for my little guys. The house, as dignified as it could,
offered me glimpses. I was able to see it that day as I did when it was still
mine, and even when I only visited it as Grandpa and Grandma’s house.
I took a couple photos and wished I had taken more before,
back when its brown was not shrouded in this unsuitable blue veil, back when the
field glistened unobstructed, with sun goldened breeze blown grasses, and hovering
dragonfly’s glassine wings, and grasshoppers leaping in every direction.
I wonder, if I had more pictures of my yesterdays would they
match the pictures in my mind today? Maybe it is better left to my glorified remembrances.
A visit to the house, combined with visiting my aunts and uncles
while vacationing with my parents, and their reminiscent conversation of the house’s
early days, sparked this wish. They told of how the boards that built the house
were salvaged from another family house, painstakingly dismantled and moved to
the new land. There the boards were prepared for their second life, the
construction of a new family home.
I knew the boards were from another house. I had heard my
Dad tell the story of how he as a ten year old boy helped with the construction
by pulling old nails from the boards, readying them for his new bedroom, shared
with two older brothers but no less his. The boards he cleaned up would be his
family’s new kitchen and living room and bathroom, their new
home. What I did not know was that the house the boards were taken from had
been in the family. Those boards collectively were once shaped very differently
than the new shape they were destined for. Those boards would be infused with
my grandfather and father and uncles. I would not have been surprised to learn
if even grandma’s hands had been calloused by those boards. No doubt salt
stained the woods surface when sweat dripped from the ends of noses, and slim divots
in the boards would if they could, tell the stories of the wood slivers that
filled them before marking the builder’s hands. If these boards could talk, some
of them would tell about the knees they steadied as sheathing was attached to
them. They would tell how wonderful it was to be erected and resurrected to a
status of “new”, put back to work for good use.
I listened as my Dad and uncles talked about their horses
and told of how Grandpa fitted them for their horseshoes. I listened covetously
for any detail they would recall and share.
Yes, between the visits that summer more than twenty years
after the house was mine, and the conversations of the family whose house it
was before it was mine, whose house it was before it was a house, when it was
only a pile of boards, boards that were a whole different house belonging to a
whole different set of family, between these two things, the spark was fanned.
I have no unfulfilled life dreams, with the exception of
what was rooted in that house. Going back to visit it and talking about the
place and time, and times previous, kept those dreams from being so far
removed. Just knowing I could go back there to visit the house validated the dreams.
Regardless of the houses state of repair, the fact that it was there has been
salve to soothe the broken places of dreams.
Since the house has been vacant these past few years I have
considered, wishfully but not realistically, how I could salvage any little
portion of the dream.
What if I had the money and could just contact the owner,
and buy it back? Well, that really would not be the same at all, what with the
field acres belonging to someone else now and their new house on it. My acres would never again extend to the
creek. And the house, it too has been altered, and neglected for too long. My
pretty wallpaper painted over, grandma’s pink and black checked floors probably
gone. But maybe under the living room carpet the old linoleum still remains.
Maybe I could peel away even a small section to claim, as evidence of my past,
a 1940’s gift to the 1960’s kid who remembers it, to the me now who appreciates
it more than ever, a little too late. Oh how excited I would be to go into the
house and find the wood doors with glass knobs and skelton key plates still intact,
and claim them once again as mine. And how difficult could it be to get in
there and disconnect the one piece kitchen cupboards and porcelain sink to restore
again for my own? And what about a few boards, couldn’t I create a magnificent
re-use, a wonderful third purpose of even just a few planks of the near 100
year old wood?
An urgency has stirred the embers. The spark has been fanned
to a flame. After these few years of vacancy and non response to inquiries, I learned
a couple days ago that the house 1500 miles away from where I now call home, is
for sale. It is listed as a land sale. The house apparently in too poor a condition
to be considered refurbishable, still stands, but potential buyers would likely
demolish it. It’s possible a salvager’s eye could come in and rescue the
beautiful neglected. But would they? Is it worth that effort to anyone? A
silent shout jumbles my insides and scrambles my brain, yes! Yes it is worth
it! Could I be the salvager? The possibilities are butterflies in my stomach
exciting. The impossibilities are depressingly defeating.
It is not that I want to go back. I do not. I left there and
all that is there for legitimate reasons and I love where I have come to. Going
back is not my motivating thought, but for this one thing. The dreams there
were the dreams of naive youth, they were hope-full. The house offered only
goodness and happiness.
I am connected to that house as a child in the backseat of
my family car, pulling into the tar tab driveway lined with golden horsetail
weeds waving in a summer breeze, to my own tall frosty bottle of Pepsi-Cola pop
on a summer Sunday afternoon when it was Grandma and grandpas.
I am connected to that house from the days when Grandma and
Grandpas rooms filled with my own little boys. My sweet little sweaty faced,
grass stained boys, with dirty hands full of weed-flowers for mommy.
In that house was joy mingled bitter sweetly with fear and
hurt. That house the witness. That house, those layers of paint and wall paper,
that linoleum and carpet, those sturdy boards, they kept us. They kept us not
quite warm enough in winter, but spring’s promises came. They kept us with care
when care was otherwise delinquent. Three of my children were born
while that was the house we called home.
By the time I locked the house’s doors for the final time, I
had become the mother of five sons. Sons I knew I did not want to raise in the
same surroundings, the same schools as I myself had been raised. It felt like a
trap there, like I had to get out while I still could. I felt I would lose them,
lose us, if we stayed. I would have moved those acres and that house from that
place with me if it had been possible. It never was the house, the land, that
pushed me away. It was the messes, the changes, the lack of options, the final
straw, and the mice that wore me down to pack it in and call it finished there.
Many, many days since then, I have missed it, missed the
house, the land, and the dreams. I underestimated them, the value of it all.
But I see the value now, of course, it’s always the way.
Within the walls of that house on that parcel of land, I
gained insight, courage, confidence, and inspiration. I would have chosen more
positive motivation but then the results would have been different.
Within the walls of that house a friendship was woven of
strong cords that covered me and my children, helping me keep us from being
swallowed up by the invisible threat of destruction that lurked and loomed
heavy. Like the plaster of the house walls covering sturdy dependable boards,
so was that friendship.
Now I wish I could go back, but just long enough to retrieve
some of the pieces, literally. And, to bid one last farewell to what was
before, all of what was there among the silent, keeping boards, before it is
taken away as if it never existed, before heavy equipment and dump trucks
remove every evidence of it, and the us we were there.
I would gratefully go back for some of those pieces of my yesterdays,
to have for today, and to carry forward with me into my tomorrows. I would very
happily re-shape for a third purpose some of those old, storied boards into a new
thing of beauty and value.
That is after all, what they did for me.
P.J.
